Deliberate Freelancer

Today’s guest is Emily Derouin, a licensed psychologist in Denver, Colorado. She works as a clinician and supervisor at a community mental health center, where she is a generalist, helping people with a wide variety of issues. She also works one day a week in private practice, where she specializes in eating disorders.    As we approach the one-year anniversary of the pandemic lockdown, Emily helps us figure out how to deal with our emotions around that. Milestones and anniversaries are difficult, partly because they remind us that time is passing. In the case of the pandemic, we’re reminded that not only is time passing, but it’s passing and we still can’t do a lot of the things that we want to do.   Grief has been a common emotion this past year. A lot of people think of grief in terms of a death, and maybe a breakup, but grief applies to any kind of loss—loss of routine, predictability.   A lot of us feel we should be used to this, the lockdown routine, by now. Emily jumped on Melanie’s use of the word “sh